Le 28 juin 2017
de 15h00 à 15h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 6
Séance - Leading Figures of Modernity (I): Messiaen, Dutilleux, and Kurtág
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Vincent Benitez
In a conversation with Claude Samuel in 1986 about Saint François d’Assise (1975–83), Olivier Messiaen declared that scene 6, Le Prêche aux oiseaux, signified his “greatest success in the bird-song style.” Undoubtedly, Saint Francis and his love of nature inspired Messiaen the Roman Catholic to focus on the friar’s life for the subject of his magnum opus. He considered Saint Francis as a fellow ornithologist because of his fondness for birds, as exemplified by his fabled sermon to them at the Carceri. Indeed, this sermon was a critical factor in Messiaen’s choice of subject for his opera. Not surprisingly, birdsong plays a significant role not only in the large-scale musical and theological design of Saint François but also in Messiaen’s complex musical surfaces.
This paper examines how birdsong shapes Saint François from both structural and theological viewpoints. It analyzes the music of several birds from both melodic and harmonic perspectives, showing how these avian songs fit into the opera’s flow of musical events. The paper then examines how birdsong influences Saint François’s formal designs at deeper structural levels. The songs of the Alouette des champs I and II lead the way in this regard, as their instrumental colorings function as referential timbres, subsuming their pitch materials as they help to define the opera’s structural designs. In relation to the opera’s theological message, birdsongs not only signify the presence of nature in the drama but also the unseen realm of God. They are, in essence, celestial characters that comment on the seen realm of Saint Francis.
